rogue-ing with robin carstensen

As I noted in my recent microreview & interview of Robin Carstensen’s In the Temple of Shining Mercy, one of the things that moved me was the use of empathy as a kind of engine for poetry throughout the collection. The close and true listening required of this kind of writing is instructive and illuminating. Instructive in that it focuses attention on ways to simply be there via poetry; illuminating because of the way the there is unpacked and explored.

An example of what I mean can be found in “Rogues on the Heath,” another poem from Carstensen’s book. Here, the speaker develops a narrative involving tomcats in their life, a narrative that quickly cascades into a meditation on the nature of connecting with others, either through letters or touch. By the end, the speaker presents their own sudden understanding of a need as “feral” and innate as those of the tomcats.

Rogues on the Heath – Robin Carstensen

Tomcats crying on the porch
beneath the bludgeoning sun
will lunge at the bowl
so fiercely the thin blonde one
will knock the food out
as if he’s up to bat when I stoop
to pour. A thousand tiny saws
rattle their throats to stir me
awake, for it is nearly noonday,
and the night was long
and treacherous. I should
ease their abscessed faces,
put their limp bodies down,
should have done the deed
months ago, but both are warm
against my hand, and I am
a cowardly god. An orphaned
one, come down, swung low,
swing low sweet chariot. Here
is morning’s sumptuous hope
on the wane around my ankles,
crawling through feral eyes,
as if my emergence was a letter
like all the letters I’d written
to the one I didn’t love
to death but cared for — the colors
of tulips I’d mentioned but not
their fragrance blooming inside
my coral spring, how I’d saved them
for love, and how the one starving
for it would gnaw my sternum
to shreds, suckle my veins
into brittle twine, because nothing
matters more than the barren stretch
between words in all their bounty
pressing our warm ribs — bowls
and bowls of touch achingly
unable to fill the vast moors of us.

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Published by Jose Angel Araguz

José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and the author of six chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear (Floricanto Press) and Small Fires (FutureCycle Press). His poems, prose, and reviews have appeared in RHINO Poetry, New South, and Queen Mob’s Tea House. He runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence and teaches English and creative writing at Linfield College.
View all posts by Jose Angel Araguz